[Am-info] SAP CEO: Adoption Of Standards Key To Industry's Survival

[Fred A. Miller]

SAP CEO: Adoption Of Standards Key To Industry's Survival

The computing industry won't survive without standards to make
software applications interoperable, Hasso Plattner, co-chairman
and CEO of German software maker SAP, said Wednesday at the
JavaOne developers conference in San Francisco.

"We can't build the coming generation of systems on multiple
frameworks. It will not work," he said. The software business "is
so big that no company can build totally alone anymore."
Plattner, whose company has moved aggressively to open up its
proprietary systems during the last several years, said he had
failed to convince Microsoft chairman Bill Gates and CEO Steve
Ballmer to attend the conference. A theme throughout the
conference has been the competition between Java, developed by
Sun Microsystems, and Microsoft's .Net framework for building and
deploying Web applications. "Only if standards between
applications and the framework are as close and as rigid and
simplistic as SQL, then there's a chance to port applications
within one database to another database," Plattner said. SQL is
the language supported by all relational databases designed for
client-server environments.

SAP will make its SAP Web Application Server compatible with the
Java 2 Enterprise Edition version 1.3, the latest version of the
application platform, Plattner said. The new server, which has
been under development since 2000 and should be available in
June, is a key component of the company's open-integration
infrastructure mySAP technology.

Existing standards such as the Simple Object Access Protocol and
Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration, core
components of emerging Web-services standards, aren't enough to
bridge the gap between applications, he added. The biggest
problem is semantics integration--the kind of information
applications have to understand about companies or employees and
how they should be related and classified. - Christopher T. Heun

More on SAP
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http://update.informationweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eGYe0Bce7K0V20BaWV0AG

SAP Takes On Celestial Challenge
http://update.informationweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eGYe0Bce7K0V20BXLD0Ac

-- 
Fred A. Miller
Systems Administrator
Cornell Univ. Press Services
fm@cupserv.org, www.cupserv.org
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